What is “User Experience Design” exactly? Should you not start it unless you are fully dedicated, or should you embrace it in the process as soon as possible? Are all designers also user experience designers, or is it a separate expertise? The debate is as old as the discipline itself, and while picking up a bucket of popcorn, sitting back and watching the drama is sometimes fun, let’s try to figure out which user experience techniques are useful for startups, in-house teams, big corporations and anyone who wants to improve their website, product or service.

The mobile application development landscape is filled with many ways to build a mobile app. Among the most popular are: native iOS, native Android, PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. This article marks the start of a series of four articles covering the technologies above. The series will provide an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of these four approaches. Because few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, this series is intended to broaden your scope.

Have you ever submitted design files to a development team for production and a few weeks later gotten something back that looks nothing like your original work? Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage. A design is more than a simple drawing on a canvas in Illustrator, Fireworks or Photoshop; it is a representation of function. “Form follows function” is a well-known principle, first coined in 1896 by the architect Louis Sullivan. How will the website work? How will that section fold? What happens when you hover over this button? How does that menu function?

As Web designers, we are largely constrained by the layout features available to us. Content placed inside a container will often naturally extend the container vertically, wrapping the content. If a design requires elements to remain a certain height, then our options are limited. In these cases, we can only add a scroll bar or hide the overflow. The CSS Regions specification provides a new option.

Inspiration strikes at funny times. Chris Behr was just watching TV and playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. His mind wasn’t focused on either task. He casually divided a square into a grid, then randomly colored it. Something about the colors inspired him to combine the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling the night before. Thus, Nice Things was born, a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that we are honored to present to you.

In this article, we’ll take you on a thought-provoking journey through a couple of carefully selected Web designs. Certainly, these websites have some captivating interactivity; however, the selection of type and the typographic styling and spacing are the reasons why we chose them for this piece. In the context of typography, considering composition and grid structure is also important.

Axure is a powerful tool for creating software prototypes quickly. Getting started with it is really easy; however, therein lies a danger. The tool is so intuitive that many users can be productive without undergoing any formal training. What they might not be aware of is that they probably aren’t using Axure optimally.

As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction. After more than five years helping content and design teams capture,
measure and understand website performance data (client-side at
Bazaarvoice and now at Volusion), Ashley Moreno has learned a lot about connecting
the dots between data and design improvements.

Central to a solid user experience is a well-structured, simple navigation system. Over the past few months, Jon Rundle has been involved in launching two large institutional websites with complex navigation systems. Maintaining simplicity on such large websites becomes increasingly difficult as content requirements grow and tiers of navigation are added, not to mention the extra complexity added by small screens.

If you’ve developed mobile applications or have just started building one, then you probably realize that marketing should be as much of an ongoing concern as the product’s design and development. After all, what’s the point in creating a beautiful, valuable app if no one knows about it? Assuming that promotion on Google Play or Apple’s App Store will take your app from beta to bestseller is… well, magical thinking. In reality, most successful developers kick off their marketing efforts months before release.